A single buffalo supplied the Métis with a large amount of meat. Therefore, they needed to find a way to preserve some of that meat to keep it from going bad.

Most of the buffalo meat was used to make ‘pemmican’, which lasted for year without spoiling.

Pemmican was usually made from buffalo meat.

Drying the meat ensured that it did not go bad.

How to make pemmican:

First, the buffalo meat was cut into long strips.

The strips were then dried on racks, either over a fire, or in the sun.

The dried buffalo meat was then pounded into granular form.

Once in granular form, it was placed into animal-hide bags.

Hot buffalo fat was poured into the bags and mixed with the dried meat.

Wild berries were added to the mixture for flavour.

The hide bag were sewn shut, and the pemmican kept for years.

Pemmican was a nutritious and filling snack, and was eaily transported on long trade journeys.

Pemmican recipe

Ingredients:

2 lbs of buffalo meat

¼ cup of berries (blueberries or saskatoon berries)

5 tablespoons of animal fat

Steps:

Cut meat into long strips

Hang meat in the sun to dry

When dry, pound strips into flakes

Mix together flakes and dried berries in hide bag (or bowl)

Add melted fat (hot)

Add berries (optional)

Jerky

Another way to prepare buffalo meat was to dry the meat and cut it into small pieces- called buffalo jerky.

Bannock

The Métis ate a lot of ‘bannock’. Bannock was a combination of Scottish bread and Indian fry bread that could be baked in an oven, cooked in a skillet over a fire, or fried. The benefit of bannock was that it was easy to make and transport. It also lasted a long time without spoiling, and was quite filling.

The Métis harvested wild turnips, peeled and dried them, and then pounded them into flour for use in the bannock. The Métis also traded with the HBC and NWC for flour.

Tools

The Métis used all parts of the buffalo that they hunted- nothing was wasted.

They used buffalo skin to make:

Containers

Shields

Buckets

Ropes

Bags

They used buffalo bones to make:

Knives

Pipes

Arrowheads

Shovels

Clubs

They used buffalo horns to make:

Arrows

Spoons

Powder Horns

Ladles

Buffalo herd

Steel, buffalo horn knife
Métis pipe

Métis powder horn (horn, metal, wood, leather)

Cast-iron skillet

Cooking

Storage and cooking containers were made from buffalo hides, mainly rawhide with a willow wood frame.

These skin pots could not be placed directly over a source of heat. Instead, stones were heated over a fire and placed inside the container. If the container was filled with water, then the stones brought the water to a boil.

Trade

Through trade with the Europeans, the Métis acquired more metal cooking utensils, such as: